Jazz trumpeter to perform Nov. 30

Trumpet player Scott Harrell will be the featured soloist at a concert at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 30, at the Fine and Performing Arts Center on the campus of Western Carolina University.

The concert, part of the WCU School of Music’s Catamount Concert Series, is free and open to the public.

The WCU Jazz Ensemble will play with Harrell, performing selections by Sammy Nestico, a composer and arranger of big band music who is well known for his arrangements for Count Basie’s orchestra, to more modern music of John Coltrane and Bob Mintzer.

A New Yorker since 1997, Harrell has performed with jazz artists such as Maria Schneider, the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra and the Dizzy Gillespie alumni band and with contemporary groups such as Fountains of Wayne and They Might Be Giants.

Harrell also has performed with many popular Broadway shows, including “Cats,” “The Producers,” “Jersey Boys,” “Young Frankenstein,” “A Chorus Line,” “In the Heights,” “Billy Elliot,” “West Side Story” and “Memphis.” In 2009, Harrell was a featured musician in the play “Exit the King,” starring Geoffrey Rush and Susan Sarandon, and he is performing this fall in the new Broadway musical “Elf,” based on the popular motion picture of the same name.

Harrell, originally from Houston, is a graduate of the University of North Texas, where he spent three years in the One O’Clock Lab Band. He also has been a faculty member at jazz camps at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater and the University of Texas at Arlington.

For more information, contact Pavel Wlosok, assistant professor of jazz at WCU, at 828.227.3261 or This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

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